Only respect for the “principle of the unconditional priority of human life” can guarantee “the quality of scientific research”, also in the field of research on embryos, declared the Bioethical Commission if the Swiss Bishops’ Conference, in a statement dated 7 June. The Commission takes a position, in particular, on the draft constitutional article and federal law relating to “research on the human being” (LRH). Though judging positive “the wish to unify the multiple forms of legislation and different practices and fill the existing gaps”, the Swiss bishops point out that “the adopted viewpoint does not respond to the requirements of the Swiss Constitution”, according to which “human dignity is the supreme constitutive principle of the juridical order”. The LRH, say the Swiss bishops, “adopts a utilitarian position that is content to balance two values wrongly considered to be antagonistic: the protection of the personality on the one hand and the freedom of research on the other”. In particular, the Bioethics Commission contests the idea that ethics can be reduced “to an evaluation of the relation between benefits and risks” and calls it “inadmissible to consider what constitutes a major risk for the foetus as a ‘minimum risk'”. Equally “unacceptable, in the view of the Swiss bishops, is “the difference in status between embryo ‘in vivo’ and embryo ‘in vitro'”, because it presupposes that the “nature of the human embryo can be modified by a change in circumstance”.
